Children
by Coraniaid
Summary: Selected moments of krogan history, before and after the Rebellions.


The war was over almost as soon as it began.

Everyone had known it was coming, sooner or later. Two great empires, each vying for control of the world. And each empire less a single polity than a disparate alliance of scheming generals and self-interested factions: neither could afford to stay still. Not with a world to win.

There were those that counselled dialogue and mutual cooperation, of course. Few were willing to listen - after so long at each others' throats, with resources growing scarcer and scarcer every year, most longed only for the fragile stalemate to end once and for all. And yet there were still those prepared to risk the scorn of the crowds and the baying of the mob to argue for the cause of peace. Ageing generals, distinguished scientists, religious leaders...

Well, High Command knew what to do with them. Every war has its traitors. Those unwilling to fight can serve as examples, if nothing else.

When the shooting war finally started, the new weapons worked better than even the most optimistic of the technical experts had dared to suggest. Hours ago, for a few brief moments, the coast of the northern continent had shone like the surface of a second sun, as atomic particles tore themselves apart and the new weapons turned cities and temples alike to dust.

The immediate counter-strike suggested the new weapons were not, in fact, quite as top secret as High Command had hoped. Perhaps the techs had talked too openly to their colleagues in enemy-controlled territory about their research; perhaps one or more of them had decided there was profit to be hand in arming both sides of the coming conflict.

Every war has its traitors.

And after the war, there is this. Cities filled with rubble and corpses and fire and smoke. Air raid sirens wailing alarms to those who no longer need them, to those who no longer have ears to hear. Fields and forests littered with craters, with debris, with unexploded ordinance, with barbed wire fences and burned-out tanks and transports. Mutually assured devastation, and the sun hidden behind mile high clouds, black and heavy and terrible.

It isn't snow that's falling from those clouds now, but ash.

A thick blanket of ash already covers the ground and still it keeps on falling. Burying plants and grass and trees even as the clouds block out the sun. The crops that were planted in the summer are already starting to rot. The trees will die next.

In the cities, among the bodies of the dead, the varren and other wild animals that had been drawn out to feast lift their heads and howl when the ash begins to fall. It fills their mouths, choking them, get in their eyes and blinds them.

In the rivers, fish thrash about, darting one way and then the other. Some swim out to sea, into colder and stranger waters than they have known before. But the ash clouds follow, and strange things swim with them in the deep.

In the desert, a thresher maw breaks through the sand, seeking cool air and food but finding only burning heat and dry, arid smoke. With a scream it coils back underground, spitting poison. The maw dives deep beneath the sand to escape the heat and the flames and the poisoned air. It digs deeper that it has ever had to before, then deeper still.

Above it, the desert grows. Widening outwards as the rivers dry and the forest wither and the cities crumble.

The thresher maw is very hungry that winter.

* * *

The convoy crawls ponderously across the desert.

These are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the few who like through the days of fire. The few who survived in underground bunkers, in distant and remote island outposts, or in submerged vessels deep beneath the oceans.

Most died. Quickly, if they were lucky. Slowly and more painfully if they were not. Their guns and rockets could not protect them from the white heat that melted flesh from bones; their teeth and claws could not protect them from the radiation sickness that settled into their water and their livestock and their food; their battle armour could not protect them from the months and years of hunger as flora and fauna sickened and twisted around them.

It is very hard to kill a krogan, but the planet has been trying for a long, long time. It plagues them with burning temperatures, with thresher maws and other wild animals. It plagues them with other krogan.

Now the convoy crawls across the desert like a thresher maw on its belly, and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the survivors are carried along with it, following the same paths they did last season, and the seasons before last. Following the same route from winter camp to watering hole to trading point that they followed last year, or a decade past.

But something has changed. Something is different from last season and all the seasons before. Something that nobody expected, something new.

A stranger was waiting at the watering hole; a strange creature that stands on two legs like a krogan but looks small and soft and weak.

The convoy is led by a scarred and cunning warrior, eldest surviving son of eldest surviving son of Kohrr who came through the Fire. He has led the convoy for centuries, now, led the whole clan of Kohrr's people as they travel across the dying landscape, fighting for survival against the world and against the other clans. He has earned and kept his place as leader of the convoy by strength and by cunning and by sheer obstinate determination. With a weapon in his hands and his krantt by his side, there is nothing in this sick and hostile world that he fears. He will speak with the stranger on his clan's behalf.

The stranger talks in strange wet noises, chittering and squeaking like nothing the clan leader has ever heard. But the machines it brought with it - smaller and more intricate than anything the clans have seen before - they translate, rendering the nonsense into a reasonable approximation of real language. After a few minutes one can forget that the machines are there at all.

And the things it says are … intriguing.

The clan leader has learned caution, after a thousand years wandering the desert. So he guards his expression as the _salarian_ speaks; tries not to spook it by showing his teeth. The alien talks and talks and talks, about war in the heavens, and terrible monsters to be fought, and worlds to be won. The clan leader tries not to think about how much the alien looks like food.

And across Tuchanka the same conversation is playing out, salarians meeting with the leaders of Clan Raik and Clan Urdnot and Clan Gatatog and dozens and dozens of smaller clans and half-clans and with the leaders of those with no clan at all.

Across Tuchanka promises are made and deals are struck. And a bargain is made.

The krogan will be lifted up to the stars, given weapons and technology of which they had not even thought to dream. And in return they will teach the galaxy the art of war.

* * *

The battlemasters and warlords have called for a Crush of all the clans. Here in the sacred place where the ancestors were interred.

One by one the veterans and heroes of the rachni wars come to the front to make their case. Graken Dhal, captain of the first ship to reach the rachni homeworld. Okeer, who has long advocated for the ancient krogan virtue of self-perfection through constant struggle. Shiagur, warrior and mother of warriors, who fought the rachni queens tooth against claw in their underground nests. And Warlord Kredak, who many were already calling Overlord Kredek: pre-eminent among them all.

All these speakers argue for the same position. The Council owe the krogan a great debt, and it is time for the debt to be paid.

Salarian trickery did not defeat the rachni; no spy or stealth assassin saved the Council from the alien armies that they had unleashed through their own foolish carelessness. Asari diplomacy did not break the might of the invaders at Suen; it was not asari commando units that led the final bombardments of rachni power.

So why then do the asari and salarians rule over the galaxy - deigning sometimes to dangle out small prizes or rewards for the other species, sometimes choosing instead to bicker and barter like merchants? Why are the krogan treated like foolish children?

The krogan have bled for these people; have fought and died in countless numbers. In return they have been given empty speeches and parades and statues. But not all the worlds that they were promised. Not as many worlds as their children will need. You cannot build for the future on words and medals.

All the krogan want is what should already be theirs by right. Room to expand, fresh worlds to settle, a seat on the galactic Council. All the krogan want is justice. Now they have come together at the Crush to learn to make these desires a reality.

If you think we deserve to prosper, Okeer challenges them, then prepare to fight to prove it.

If you want to defend what we won against the rachni, says Gaken Dhal, then prepare to fight again.

If you want a future for our children, Shiagur warns them, then prepare to fight for them.

If you want justice, says Kredak, then prepare for war.

Days later, news comes from the Citadel. None of it good.

Overlord Kredek and his emissaries thrown out of the Presiduum; the dignity of the Overlord impugned by Citadel Security; the krogan demands rejected out of hand. The krogan people treated with contempt yet again. Looked down on and scorned by those unable and unwilling to do their own dirty work.

Very well then. Those who attended the Crush are of one mind now, one voice.

If the Council choose war, then war they shall have.

* * *

It is a glorious thing, he thinks, to make war upon a galaxy. To reach out a fist and force the universe to bend as you will it.

The sun is setting on Tuchanka and the warlord, sprawled on his throne, lets his thoughts turn towards the future.

The krogan will inherit the galaxy: This much is obvious, even to the Council. Surely. The destiny of the krogan cannot be stopped. It is, ultimately, a question of genetics, of demographics. The armies of the krogan may suffer defeat, but the krogan people cannot lose the war. Each planet they capture makes them stronger: gives them more space to grow, new young to raise.

He almost pities his children, who will rule over a galaxy and yet not know the glory of conquering it. Still, when the asari and the salarians and the turians are overthrown, their monuments torn down and their cities turned to dead ash ... perhaps then there will be new challenges, new enemies. New worlds for his sons and daughters to conquer. Other galaxies, if necessary.

Two sons already, he thinks proudly, and more children on the way.

The warlord has heard rumours, in the last few weeks. Unsettling reports.

Rumours spreading out from the spaceports, whispers of salarian secret weapons. The salarians are nothing, he reminds himself, settling back complacently. An asari will fight, if pressed, and she will fight well. He himself bears the scars of duels with asari commandos, where their biotic attacks have pierced armour, torn through flesh, made wounds that a lesser warrior would not have survived. But a salarian fights like a coward, scrambling for allies or technological aid or underhanded tricks.

His ancestors should have known better than to make deals with weaklings of this sort.

These _turians_ the salarians have found fight well enough, he would concede, though they fight grimly, without the passion or joy of true warriors. They fight and die bravely enough, but they die all the same. Bad luck for them that they let the salarians talk them into joining this war. After the fighting is over, he thinks, historians will remember that the turians faced extinction with honour.

But the salarians … no, history will not remember them at all. He resolves to put all thoughts of this secret weapon out of his mind. The salarians are beneath contempt.

He dozes peacefully, after that. Sleeps for several hours in the fading heat of Tuchanka's setting sun. When he wakes up the sun has set. _Something is wrong_, he thinks. There is always noise in the camp: shouting, yellowing, sometimes screaming. But the screams now have a different tone. Not anger or pain but something else. Grief, maybe. Terror.

He feels a chill that has nothing to do with the departed sun.

The screams are coming from the women's quarters, where his mate is giving birth.

* * *

Dark night on Tuchanka, under a moonless, cloudless sky.

Here under the stars, in the Hallows, the sacred place of the krogan, there is only death. For generations the honoured krogan dead have been buried here - before the Rebellion, before the rachni, before the desert convoys and before the Fire. Those krogan who survive long enough to sire offspring, to wrest victories great and small from an indifferent and hostile universe - this is where they come when their last battle is over.

This is where the bones of the ancestors lie. The Hallows has been witness to scenes of grief, of raging anger, of joyous celebration.

And in the night just gone, witness to one more sordid and pointless betrayal.

A lone figure pulls itself up from the dirt, shakes its head. It - _he_ \- looks around as if dazed. His face is smeared with mud and blood and worse. Armour cracked, skin torn, secondary organs struggling … but alive. Improbably - impossibly - alive.

Around him, among the old bones of his ancestors, lie the still warm bodies of his krantt. Trusted allies, childhood friends. Dead. All dead. _Betrayed_. They believed in him, fought for him. Died for him, for his vaguely understood vision of a better tomorrow. For something he didn't even have the words to properly explain.

And at his feet, impaled through the heart by his own dagger, another body. One he knows well.

He stares up at the stars and bellows rage and defiance.

This is what Tuchanka has made of her children, he thinks. Particides and parricides. Animals. Corpses. Perhaps this is all that there can ever be, here on this diseased and poisoned planet. Perhaps the old ones and the stubborn ones were right.

Well, so be it. His people have chosen barbarism and stagnation, then. They can die without his help. This is not a world worth fighting for. Not anymore. He's not doing the galaxy any favours by staying.

By morning he has booked a place on an outbound shuttle, signed up as a mercenary for a company whose name he has already forgotten. He is heading to the Citadel, and from there outwards to the fringes of the galaxy.

Even with the Rebellion over, with the krogan people pariahs and outcasts across Council space, the galaxy needs warriors. So he will fight and kill for credits, as so many of his kind have done before and will do again. Fight and kill, bleed and die. What else have the krogan ever done?

Behind him, on the view screen, the planet grows smaller and smaller. A pale dot in a sea of pale dots, dwindling down to insignificance.

He doesn't look back.


End file.
